People born in the 1980s were the last generation to experience life without the Internet. Why is that interesting?
Because since then, increasingly, life lived on the Internet has shaped behavior. When the young man was talking crap to Mike Tyson and got punched in the face, in many ways that is emblematic of life lived on the Internet. You say stuff to people all day, day after day, and don’t get punched in the face. Then you happen to be out in the world, with behavior shaped by life lived on the Internet, and you get punched in the face.
Life lived on the Internet dehumanizes.
Everything.
People aren’t human, they are things, followers, foils or adversaries. The Internet rewards with dopamine hits — followers, reTweets, the approbation that is the coin of the realm. It makes people do and say things that in real life they never would, but Internet life isn’t real even as it becomes real for the people who are immersed in it, but in a selfish way. “I am real, what I feel when people react to my stuff is real, but none of the things I post about are real, really. Just things.”
Which brings us to Marc-Andre Ter Stegen, hashtags and the utter lack of humanity surrounding the situation in Barça Twitter (Barça X just sounds weird, so yeah.) A hashtag campaign has started, has grown increasingly virulent and ugly. A “supporter” of the club has even made a video that is making the rounds, of all of the Ter Stegen errors.
My views on the hashtag campaign, which feels more like a tantrum to me, are clear, and clearly stated: those people are horrible. And they aren’t horrible because they want the club to acquire a new keeper, feeling that the current No. 1 keeper isn’t up to the standard. It’s doubtful that there is anyone at the club or who follows the team, me included, who thinks that Ter Stegen should continue as the starting keeper for FC Barcelona. Cool.
What is happening with this hashtag stuff is a symptom of life lived on the Internet, where people cease to be human. Ter Stegen is just a thing, something to be used to get those dopamine hits. “Yeah, got more likes for my video, or my Tweet calling him a terrorist.”
The problem with that is obviously that Ter Stegen is human. He has friends, a family, hopes and ambitions. He has ideas about his level of play that any human would have. He thinks he’s better at his job than he is, just like the vast majority of people digitally piling on. If people were to meet him in real life, they would probably find that he’s a pretty nice dude. Or maybe not. Immaterial. What is material is that he is a human being.
In my past life as a journalist, my job entailed arts criticism, from visual art to movies. It also meant opportunities to write columns off the news. Invariably, no matter how nasty and vituperative the e-mail, a response brings about an immediate change of tone. “Whoa, shit! There is a human on the other end of this thing!”
What social media does, what life lived on the Internet does, is make people forget that there is a human on the other end of this thing. “I support the club, therefore those things are my property, to do with as I desire.” As a soci for going on two decades, whose dues ostensibly fund the club and its operations at a thimble-like level, my opinions about players, managers, things the club does are many. But the thing I have never, ever forgotten is that the people I am talking about are human. Nothing written by me isn’t something I wouldn’t say to that person’s face. That’s fair.
When we forget that people are human, liberties are taken, and people think it’s okay. One of my favorite thought exercises for people is to ask them what it would be like if, at their job, they were assessed by multitudes, who talked about it on social media. They call you an asshole if you made an accounting error, didn’t perform your job perfectly. Day after day, at work and on social media. You log on and there you are, a hashtag blaring to the world how shitty someone thinks you are, with posts to back up their opinion.
It’s a safe bet that most people wouldn’t like it, would say, “Don’t they realize I have feelings, that my friends and family can see that stuff?”
Well, no, because you aren’t human to them. Twitter makes us all avatars, blocks of type with which people interact, argue with, quote Tweet. Of all the people I have met in real life from Twitter, there was only one where the interaction wasn’t with another human in that human way, and it was weird, and stunted, and brief.
We are each a self-contained world on the Internet, and too often forget what it’s like in the real world, of people and feelings and humans and maybe getting punched in the mouth. That isn’t a good thing.
One person asked me, “What are we supporters supposed to do?” Well, calm down and don’t be horrible, because even the biggest hashtag campaign on the planet will have about the same effect on the FC Barcelona technical staff as farting in the direction of Barcelona and hoping they smell it. They have budgets, and priorities, and ideas about needs. They have talked with the manager who has delivered his ideas about what needs what, and when.
Those people don’t give a shit about your hashtag, or increasingly ugly utterings. Ter Stegen, Araujo have been the targets this season, and both look set to stay at the club. Want to talk about their play, and how them staying means the club isn’t likely to win any silver or Champions League? Cool. You can do that without being horrible, without being inhuman. Really. You can.
Empathy is a muscle, one that is easy to have atrophy in a Darwinian way. Use it or lose it. The Internet doesn’t care about empathy unless everyone is told, by someone with enough juice for it to register, “Hey, you need to be empathetic about this.”
“Oh. Yeah. Okay. Wow, yeah.”
Otherwise, very little registers because the Internet doesn’t make anything real. Or human. It’s for us, by us, about us. The target of our … whatever? Not human, so anything goes. Everything about that is wrong. Will any of it change? No, because of life lived on the Internet. And that is a shame.